This invention relates to a box made of plastics, particularly suitable for containing small items.
At the present time, for containing small items, for example game pieces, such as mosaic elements, small hardware, stationary, haberdashery or toilet articles, etc., it is a general practice to use boxes of plastics whose body or at least their cover are made of a trasparent material, because it is generally required that the contents of the box could be examined before opening the box. However, the use of plastics having such a degree of trasparency as to allow a clear vision therethrough involves various disadvantages, among which in particular a higher cost of the boxes as compared with those made of opaque or little trasparent materials, a considerable brittleness, a low agreableness to the touch and the impossibility to form the box with an overturnable cover integral therewith, connected to the box through lamellar hinges. This impossibility is due to the insufficient resistance to repeated bendings of the available plastics having a high degree of trasparency. In fact, boxes having a more or less high degree of trasparency and provided with a cover connected thereto by lamellar hinges are produced only for those cases in which the box is intended to be thrown away after extraction of its contents, such as, in particular, the special boxes having a number of cells intended to contain eggs. On the other hand, a cover integral with the body of the box is highly desirable in view of the resulting impossibility of lossing it and the practicalness of use of the boxes provided with such a cover.
Furthermore, a general disadvantage arising in the manufacture of boxes made by injection moulding of plastics consists in that, in order to obtain a sufficient flow of material, it is unavoidable to give to the walls of the box a thickness considerably higher than that which would be required for resistance purposes, with a consequent considerable waste of material.
Another general disadvantage of the boxes intended to contain small items consists in that such boxes tend to collect dust and foreign matter particles, which remain mixed with the small items contained in the box, thereby soiling them and requiring that, from time to time, the small items are withdrawn from the box in order to blow away the dust before reintroducing the items into the box.